What I think about this is this is a great step on making Debian live again. I've been a developer since 2001 and I felt the same as Adrian Bunk many times... we like to see our work being rewarded, and one of the ways to feel rewarded is seeing your work being used on the Real World. This bad feeling surely made my motivation go down a lot.

OK, so we're droping support for some arches... in this regard what I think is we have very high expectations on the results but really lack comparably high expectations on the day-to-day work. Some time ago the GNOME packages were really badly shaped. They were, IMO because of exactly this reason, only marginally integrated into the system as a whole.

Then came the GNOME Team and proved that GNOME could become a very well packaged and maintained desktop inside Debian. The GNOME Team was good enough to raise Release Team's trustness in that it would respond fast and well enough to breakage and transitions, so GNOME 2.6 was allowed into testing, then 2.8...

The same then happened for KDE and to the Release Team itself through the time. Those teams make information flow high, so motivation and rewards are high as well. What I see is Debian understanding that when we have problems we fix them with Really Good Work, not with long flamewars which end up seeming to just want to protect some kind of holy status quo.

If you want your arch/package/anything considered for release, then get it ready and high-quality enough that it will be accepted in time. Show us the code. Great work! I feel my motivation regaining strength! Go, Debian, go!